mightytharg

Except for renters who want to be able to buy. But we all know renters are a subhuman species, so their needs don't really count.

I think you'll find that they already have. If they include this, the family in the rose-tinted view of the original post would owe another £140,000 in household debt, Californian families would owe an extra $30,000 in State debt. If you get in enough debt, Obama will give you $150,000 in FREE MONEY from the Bank of America. That's how much he likes debt. P.S. I think the household analogy is pretty good.

If you want to target public sector workers then just advertise it at a high rent. They are the most over-paid so they should flock to you. Then announce a surprise discount to your peppercorn rent and you will have successfully targeted your largesse at the least deserving members of society. HTH Tharg

You know the private pensions are bad because the public sector stole them using a dividends tax, right? As I've already mentioned, this is the opposite of what happened. It's more like a builder arriving at your door and saying, "I'm going to build you a fence and you'll pay me a million pounds". "But I don't want a fence and I don't have a million pounds". "Tough, it's a contract" "Whaaaat!?"

If you reward the feckless and punish the hard working, you are likely to end up with more feckless and fewer hard working. This destroys the economy (including the feckless in the end, since they no longer have enough hard working people to leech off). The feckless won't have to pay their debts anyway, since we have an evil thing called bankruptcy that they can use. However, if we do it the honest way then at least some of the hard workers will have access to housing.

Going out on a limb here... Could it be because the public sector scummers are overpaid?

The places to rent are going to come from the places where the renters were living before they bought the houses ot the "home-owners" who are being turfed out. It's not difficult, all the houses are still there.

Hmmm. I doubt that. Trying to drum up extra business for yourself You chip in 11.5% using OUR money then your employer hands you even more of OUR money. Stop scrounging and get a real job, or quit your whining.

I think you misunderstand the nature of contracts. If I promise to do some work for you and in exchange you promise to pay me £100, that is a contract. There is a meeting of minds, consideration, an agreement. Contrast it to this: Some public sector scummers promise THEMSELVES millions of pounds each in exchange for little or no work. I never agreed to it, I never even knew about it. Where is the contract? This is just some deluded scum trying to extort unreasonable amounts of money from the private sector. Now do you see the difference?

I presume you are one of these people who think that evictions of "home owners" is some sort of terrible shock. Whereas evictions of renters at two weeks notice is perfectly fine (since those sort of people don't really count anyway). I've never really understood this point of view. The good thing about mass evictions is that it would move houses into the hands of the people who can afford them. A happy side effect is that it would allow prices to normalise and the economy to recover. Whilst it's great that the BofA has so much money that it's giving it away, I'm not sure why Obama has chosen such undeserving recipients (is it because they is black?).

Anyone who has been to a restaurant in Greece knows how lazy they are. Not sure how this compares to Germany, don't know anyone who likes sausages and sauerkraut enough to have ventured in one.

Say the bosses were on ten million pounds a year at 40% tax rate. Take home £6,000,000 Then they get two 11% pay rises but now they pay 50% tax, take home £6,050,000. That;s a 1% pay rise over two years. But their employees got 1.1% in a single year, and their tax stayed the same. So the employees did better.

We're all in it together except for the public sector who keep increasing taxes, printing money and increasing spending.

The bosses didn't perform very well so they took a pay cut. Hard on them, but seems reasonable in the circumstances.

That video was nonsense. The obvious answer to all the problems is to run a trade surplus, they dismissed this (because they thought it might be hard, diddums). Similarly, if I'm $120 million in debt and I want to pay it back, I can just scribble a picture of some whining mummy thing and auction it. Then I pay off the debt. I could just build a house instead of getting a mortgage, which would increase my net wealth and reduce the debt in the system. How did he manage to buy the car and still have the value the same after he drove it off the lot? Why did they suddenly forget about the real assets and focus on the financial ones? Is it some sort of disinformation campaign to keep us happy slaves while the public sector get stuck into more caviar and champagne?

Does 11% even keep up with the money printing and tax rises? I guess not, they need a 25% rise (over 2010, 2011) just to keep up their after tax salaries. So if they got 11% each year for the two years, they've taken a pay cut. The pay in general rose 1.1% so the workers did much better than their bosses. To summarize, bosses have reduced their pay, the people working for them have had theirs increased. Yet for some reason, the Socialists are still complaining. Have I got this right?

Except they are helping buyers. Higher interest rates are causing this nasty little scheme to fail. This will reduce prices and help the buyers.

Actually, it would be laughably easy. Raise interest rates, cut government spending in half, allow housebuilding. The coallition could have done these things in the first month. The reason people are struggling is because other people want them to be struggling.

So, is that a bad thing (having a smaller money supply)? Couldn't we give the people we owe money to other assets instead, property, water rights etc.

Yes, but the British government is so awash with cash, it has been wasting it on things like duckhouses, third homes and £100,000/year rents for unemployed Somalian families. They can afford to cut billions before anyone would notice. Debt write-offs are obviously nice for the deadbeats, but not fair on the people who lent the money, so for that reason I'm against them. A slightly smaller economy seems like a good thing - better for the environment, more sustainable etc.

No, Greece and Spain are spending more than they take in taxes. I'm suggesting we try the exact opposite. Spend less money than we take in taxes and use the excess to pay back some of the debt.

Take London for example. Half of everything that gets built goes to scummers on "affordable housing". Then scummers on housing benefit get the rent paid at the 30th percentile (I think 40% the people in London are on housing benefit). This leaves very few houses for decent people. If they reduce housing benefit and affordable housing in London, then it promotes fairness and equality. People will be more equal with their Northern cousins. Their will be fewer wealthy trade-unionists in subsidised accommodation lording it over the rest of us with our huge rents or mortgages. As housing costs come down, industry and employment will flourish, so fewer people will need housing benefit. If they remove the mortgage tax relief from BTL and allow more building (as they've promised), then the problem will be solved.

No. Individuals in the UK pay lower tax because of Switzerland. This is because the UK government know that more people will move there if they raise taxes too much. It seems you've got it completely backwards again.

I think your metaphor isn't very apt. Think of the good citizens of Zug as bug-spray. Evil leech parasites (UK government) want to suck out 60% of your blood. Use Zug bugspray and most of the leeches are kept away, now you only suffer the loss of 20% of your vital blood. Switzerland is the anti-parasite.